Contraction

The way you hold your body shapes the world for you.To test this out, just try walking, speaking, thinking for a few minutes with your jaw tightly clenched, or your stomach muscles held rigid. Or raise your shoulders by half an inch. Or hold your breath - not completely, but just enough so your breath is high in your chest and you're neither inhaling nor exhaling fully. Or tilt your head back just a little - five degrees or so more than you're used to so that you're looking down your nose. Or collapse, just a bit, in the middle - round your shoulders, bend forward just a touch, slouch.You'll find the world, and the world of possibilities for relating and acting, are subtly but palpably different in each.So there's much to be gained by paying attention to your body during the day, especially if you're working with or leading others.You could start, today, by paying attention to all the ways in which you contract throughout the day. You might be someone who starts the day quite contracted and clenched already. Even if you are, start to notice all the times you contract a little more.When someone at home hadn't put the bin out. When the train was a delayed a few minutes. When you got caught in a traffic jam. When you saw how many emails had arrived overnight. When you got called to an unexpected meeting. When someone didn't like what you said. When a conversation didn't go your way. When you didn't get out to the gym. When your client didn't buy. When it rained.As your body contracts, step by step, watch how your irritability or your reactiveness change. What happens to your relationships, your openness, your capacity to think, your creativity? Is this the way you want to be in each of them?And if, as a result of this, you're noticing a correlation between your bodily contraction and your possibility in life, there are many things you can do to make a difference.The simplest step might be just to remember to breathe - a full, long breath out and a full long breath in. It's amazing how many people live their lives in a perpetual three-quarter held breath. Or relax your shoulders and your jaw for a moment. Or lie down for a while and let your back soften into the floor. Go for a massage. Swim. Run. Take up a yoga practice.You don't have to turn, day by day, into a contracted bundle of irritability. Unless of course, you want to.

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Perfectionism

Are you sure that your perfectionism isn't just an attempt at protecting you from life, with all its chaos, messiness, decay, change and unpredictability?Or, if not perfectionism, your striving always to be in control, so that nothing can get to you?Or your insistence on harmony? Your demand to be right, or to know it all? Your clamour to rescue people every time from their difficulties? Your infatuation with being the best at everything? Your preoccupation with keeping all your options open?And what would happen if, for a while, you found out that you're way bigger than any of your obsessions and started to let life in for once?

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What's hard about kindness

George Saunders has written beautifully about the importance of kindness - a topic I've taken up here a number of times before. His article is recommended reading.One of the reasons kindness is so hard for many people, I think, is the harshness of our own inner lives. There's a vast world we choose not to show others, and it's often woven through with self-criticism, anxiety, unmet longing, fear, comparison, judgement, and a feeling of alienation from the world - of not yet being 'at home'.Because encountering ourselves can be so painful and difficult we learn to wait and hope and stay apart from one another, fearing what will happen if people see how we really are inside. And since kindness necessarily brings us into close contact with others, and with ourselves, it opens us and makes us feel vulnerable. And so we hold back.It's from here that our cynicism about kindness arises too. We confuse kindness with 'niceness', and rightly understand that niceness will never be sufficient to ease our suffering, or that of others, and so had best be avoided. But where niceness is inconstant, soft, and all about earning approval from others, genuine kindness is sharp and powerful and requires sincerity and courage. It comes from no longer making ourselves the centre of the universe, and it's far more significant and necessary than anything niceness can muster.In our holding back we imagine kindness will become possible only when our inner difficulty eases. But this is to misunderstand kindness and how it grows. The path to the inner kindness we need is paved with outer kindness to others: we have to get over ourselves, and our own self-pity, in order to extend ourselves genuinely to other human beings. And that's exactly what supports the transformation of the inner world too.And of course, by extending kindness to others we quickly find out that pretty much everyone is suffering as we are. And then we discover most viscerally how vital our kindness is, and that all our years of holding back were in vain.

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What we leave behind

My grandfather died nearly twenty years ago.For most of his adult life he owned and ran a very small, very modest clothing shop in suburban North London, like many second-generation Jewish immigrants of his time. And as he grew older, his clientele grew older with him. No flashy refits or rebrandings to reach a wider audience. Just years of dedicated service to the people he'd served for so long already.When he died, and we gathered around the graveside, I looked back to see a long line of mourners stretching back from the grave to the prayer hall. Many spoke of his care for them, of his commitment, and also of his friendship.I realised then that he was leaving behind him something that many of us never achieve, but which is worth more than status, high office, the construction of big buildings, and the making of millions (each of which, certainly, have their worth). He left behind him scores of lives touched, for the better, by the kindness and constancy of his presence in the world.And, I wonder, what would become possible if you worked on this alongside all the other important and ambitious projects you've dedicated yourself to already?

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No time to be present

"No, I don't have a moment to talk with you. No, not even to check we understand what we're doing or where we're going. Everything will come apart if I stop. And be present in what I'm doing? I don't understand what you're talking about. We'll never get there if we do that."Does your work often feel this way to you? Do you have your own version of these objections? Do you ever take your foot off the throttle enough to be here in what you're doing and be with the people you're doing it with? Does even suggesting it sound crazy?How would you feel if the pilot of the plane you're travelling in said this?Or the surgeon in whose hands you're placing your life?Or the people who handle your money?Can you imagine trusting them to do their work well if they were rushing or as disconnected from their colleagues as you're prepared to be?And is your work really so trivial, so unimportant, that you can continue to make these excuses and ignore the consequences?

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Just fine

Which is more courageous?Pretending you're fine all the time, and that nothing can touch you.Or showing people that you're human - that you feel shame, anxiety, grief, boredom, rage and sadness as well as joy, hope, excitement and confidence?And which is more likely to bring out the vibrant, compassionate, creative humanity in the people around you?Pretending you're fine denies you the opportunity to reach out for help, and denies others the opportunity of giving it to you. And because you're revealing so little of yourself, it also denies the people around the opportunity to see that everything they're experiencing is is not so unusual, not so personal as it seems, because you're experiencing it too.And, mostly, it denies you the possibility of connecting with the people around you, surely among the most important work if you're a leader, a partner, a parent or a friend.

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What you do with shame

Shame is among the most hidden of emotions because being ashamed is, itself, considered so shameful. So we develop strategies to hide it and to project it, particularly in organisational life.Projection:

Shaming others because of your own shame. Even better if they're more ashamed than you are.

Blaming them for the very actions that shamed you. Blaming them for something else entirely. Yelling at them. Judging them (so that you can convince yourself you're better than they are). Telling them how unreasonable, how inattentive, how self-centred they're being.

Saying: "I'm doing this to you because it's company policy"; "I'm doing this for your own good"; "We've decided to measure things in this new way (that will spare me shame and transfer it to you)"

Managing them out (of the room, the meeting, the company).

It's no wonder we do this, given how often parents and teachers used shame to keep us in line (or project their own shame) when we were small. And it's no wonder we work so hard to hide it.But the extent to which you do this in your family, in your team, and in your organisation is the extent to which you're actively increasing the shame in those around you.Once you know this, you have a choice. Are you prepared to own up to your own shame and work with it courageously when it occurs?Or are you going to continue constraining everyone's capacity to create, to imagine, to stand out, to step forward, and to take responsibility, simply so you can feel better?

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Business and personal

Many business difficulties are, at root, personal difficulties...

... conversations we're not bold enough to have, motives we hide and dress up as reason, emotions we don't know how to deal with, resentments we fuel, imagination constrained by blame and the fear of shame, judgements of people who are different from us, fear and anxiety we won't name, scapegoating, saving face, projections of what's in our shadow, self-pity, self-aggrandisement.But we've convinced ourselves (since the start of the industrial age) that businesses are machines rather than collections of people. It conveniently leads us to try to engineer our way out of difficulty - a detached move that saves us from having to own up to our own part in what's going on.And so when faced with what seems unsolvable, we turn to

restructures (a recurring favourite)competency frameworksmergers and acquisitionsleadership frameworksthe latest update to company policychanging what's measuredcharts of acceptable behaviourstraining programmes

rather than do the apparently more difficult, more unpredictable, more messy work of turning to one another with sincerity and curiosity, and being truthful about what's going on.So many difficulties can be solved by talking about what's happening, both within us and between us. But mostly we allow ourselves to take up the convenient story that this is irrelevant to business, out of place at work.We even call it 'soft'.Addressing the personal, emotional, relational part of our business difficulties is anything but soft. It's the hardest, most important, most rewarding and most practical problem solving arena of all.

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Not angry

"I don't get angry" she said.

But if you're human (and I think you must be), it's likely that all human emotions are within you. It's just that - perhaps for good reason - you've pushed some parts of yourself away, suppressed them so that you can't see them any more.Perhaps anger wasn't allowed in your family, or in your culture. Or maybe you had an overwhelming experience with anger when you were too small to protect yourself from it. So you did everything you could to say "not this", distancing yourself so you could stay alive wherever in the world you found yourself.And now, it's in your shadow. You recoil from it. You deny it's in you. And you project it in myriad distorted ways on others around you - you see it in your colleagues and family when there is none, you run from it, you shut it down in others, you judge those who display it and those who are not ashamed by it. You fear what it will do to you if you get too close.When you come to see anger as your shadow, you'll find out how it has everything to do with you, how you carry it with you always, how you're holding it so close you cannot see it. Quite in contrast to what you said, it may turn out that you're full of it.And you'll see how you're split off from a huge part of yourself - probably just the part you need in order to thrive, and the part we need from you too. And it's only by turning to face the darkness of the shadow, and welcoming it in, that you can lead most powerfully, and fully take up your place in the world.

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For its own sake

In the end, nothing works out permanently.Even the biggest, most robust organisations pass and fade away over time. Life as we know it keeps on changing, despite our best efforts to stop that happening. And eventually, all of us die, leaving everything we'd accumulated and created behind us. Before long, all of that disappears too.So whatever you're working on now, whatever glorious future plans and hopes you're working towards, it would be worth checking that what you're doing is also worth it for its own sake, regardless of how it turns out.Because in the end, that it mattered at the time might be all that's left.

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